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Saturday, March 13, 2010

Nexsan's evolutionary AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) energy saving technology transparently places disk drives into an idle state to vastly reduce power and cooling costs. AutoMAID delivers the cost-effecdtive benefits of MAID 2.0 without the limitations of slow access times and special host software.

AutoMAID is granular to an individual drive or RAID set and offers multiple levels of energy savings. AutoMAID is user selectable enabling users to determine the right level of response time performance to energy savings. AutoMAID is the first MAID 2.0 architecture that supports VTL, full file format D2D and standard high performance RAID implementations.

LISTEN to this brief summary from NEXSAN. Contact NavigateStorage to see how competitively price this solution can be.

Solutions for Email Archiving Businesses large and small are facing numerous challenges today in managing their growing repositories of email, including:

* Email required to be preserved and proven unalterable for many years based on new compliance regulations * Exploding volume of email to archive Troublesome retrieval of email from traditional tape or optical archives when required for legal discovery or compliance * Limited available storage space means that users must periodically either delete email or archive it offline * Nexsan's Assureon storage appliances provide safe, cost-effective means to archive the growing volumes of email, yet keep them online and rapidly retrievable.

Businesses can now keep a complete archive of all their employees' email messages without requiring them to regularly clean out their email inbox and decide which messages to keep in order to free up space. At the same time, Assureon appliances dramatically reduce the time required to backup current, active email by offloading archived email into a separate repository. Other benefits include:

NavigateStorage, a NEXSAN Partner believes that depending on what email archive application you use, the Assureon storage appliance can be set up and in use within one hour. Preloaded software features simple browser-based management and built-in "drag-and-drop" file management.

Most storage systems provide you "hope" - hope about your data privacy, integrity and longevity. But there is some data that demands guarantees.

Can you guarantee a file. . . has not been tampered with? is safe from prying eyes? is not corrupted over time?

What you need is a storage system that is as secure as a safe deposit box and as easy to access as your wallet. Nexsan’s Assureon online disk storage archive provides the privacy, integrity and longevity of a digital safe deposit box with the high speed access of disk drive technology.Assureon assures Privacy Assureon ensures the privacy of data with innovative security features: * Data Separation and SecurityEvery user or department can have their files in their own virtual safe deposit box. Within Assureon, your data is logically and physically separate from the rest of the data ensuring privacy and security. * Access Audit TrailAssureon establishes an unalterable audit trail for the life of an archived file. Every time a file is accessed, a record is kept of who accessed it and when it was accessed.Assureon assures IntegrityAssureon ensures the integrity of data with next generation self-auditing and self-healing technology * Fingerprint & IntegrityWhen data is archived, it is assigned its own unique fingerprint that stays with the file through its life cycle. If a single byte ever changes, the fingerprint will change. Revolutionary safeguards have been put into place to ensure that a file will retain its exact fingerprint through its life cycle. * Self-Auditing and Self-HealingAssureon continually monitors files for fingerprint discrepancies protecting against tampering, viruses, corruption, accidental or deliberate deletion and theft. If discrepancies are discovered, Assureon notifies you and automatically self-heals the file.

Accelerating deployment of broadband Internet and IT in business has been rapidly driving corporations toward global business collaboration with partners all over the world. Needless to say, the amount of accumulated data in a company is exploding. In this day and age, for corporations to strengthen their competitiveness, they have to find out how to strategically leverage the growing data.

NEC Storage provides the answer for your new storage strategy with a wide array of products, including NEC Storage D series of storage products for storage area networks and NEC Storage NAS Series for network-attached storage.

Visit NavigateStorage - We sell a wide variety of vendors and solutions including Data De-Dup, SAN's, NAS, DR, and more

At the core of StoneFusion is a robust storage virtualization engine that enables provisioning of physical storage resources in to virtual storage volumes. These logical volumes are presented to the host as normal SCSI disks, using industry standard hardware and software iSCSI initiators. With StoneFusion the power of IP SAN centralization is at your fingertips.

Why not let NavigateStorage tell you more and learn your challenges. Then offer a solution. Call Jim at 978-315-9000

Thursday, March 11, 2010

SATABeast Xi is a high performance, high capacity RAID storage system with the energy saving benefits of MAID 2.0 (Massive Array of Idle Disks). SATABeast Xi employs Nexsan's revolutionary AutoMAID energy saving technology to transparently place disk drives into an idle state vastly reducing power and cooling costs. AutoMAID delivers the cost-effecdtive benefits of MAID 2.0 without the limitations of slow access times and special host software.

AutoMAID is granular to an individual drive or RAID set and offers multiple levels of energy savings. AutoMAID is user selectable enabling users to determine the right level of response time performance to energy savings. AutoMAID is the first MAID 2.0 architecture that supports VTL, full file format D2D and standard high performance RAID implementations."

Nexsan, a leading storage system provider, today announced that it has released the DeDupe SG® ("Speed with Green") 2.0 solution. Nexsan's next generation of energy-efficient file storage systems are designed for data protection and disaster recovery applications that require high-performance deduplication. Integrating the latest version of the FalconStor File-Interface Deduplication System (FDS), the Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 is the first LAN-based deduplication system to offer high availability. As part of the most recent enhancements, Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 features support for Symantec's OpenStorage (OST) protocol, which accelerates data ingestion speeds for the increased performance and efficiency that today's mid-sized enterprises need.

The Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 offers redundant appliances to provide continuous data access and automatic backup application failover, raising the bar for data deduplication solutions. To dramatically increase backup speeds and reduce the complexity of recovery during a disaster, the redundant appliances offer backup server connections of up to 5.4 terabytes per hour and support for Symantec OST.

"Data deduplication technology addresses the issue of burgeoning data growth, which is a key challenge for storage administrators," said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Adoption rates for data deduplication technology are growing because it delivers greater storage efficiency and improves the economics of disk-based backup. This technology should be at the heart of any data management strategy."The Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 improves operational efficiency by leveraging the green capabilities inherent in Nexsan's industry-leading AutoMAID® technology. This energy-saving technology transparently places disk drives into their most energy-efficient state without affecting backup performance, making DeDupe SG 2.0 systems extremely power efficient."Nexsan has a unique capability and one that we believe is a first in the industry: power-managed deduplication," said George Crump, senior analyst at Storage Switzerland. "In the past, because of the deployment strategies of other solutions, all the drives needed to remain active for the deduplication process to work effectively. The Nexsan solution is designed so that the backup can be completed, deduplication cleanup processes performed, and the system be ready to be spun down soon after the backup completes."New features of the Nexsan DeDupe SG 2.0 include: * Redundant appliances for high availability * Automatic backup application failover * Symantec OST support for additional efficiency and performance * Support for industry-leading backup software solutions, including NetBackup * Replication support for up to 150 remote sites * Further automation of storage management processes * Optional 10-Gigabit Ethernet connections

NavigateStorage is in it's 10th year and specializes in Storage, Backup, EMail Archiving and Anti- Virus/Malware.

NavigateStorage recently read George's article regarding high performance problems and HDD vs. SSD, I found it quite informative and wanted to share it with you.

George Crump, Contributor02.16.2010As SearchStorage.com's recent Storage Priorities survey shows, data storage managers are making moves toward solid-state storage and solid-state drives (SSDs), with 14% of 360 survey respondents planning to implement them this year and nearly 40% planning to evaluate them this year (in addition to the 7% who already have them in place). Those numbers mean that right now, many of your customers could use help in comparing SSD vs. HDD and determining what value they'd get from implementing SSD to fix performance problems. This is a role that's tailor-made for an integrator and represents an excellent value-add opportunity for you.While SSD represents a premium in storage capacity, it's well worth it if it improves storage response time to users and critical applications. According to Jim Handy, SSD analyst at Los Gatos, Calif.-based market research firm Objective Analysis, who was interviewed for a story on SearchStorage.com, SSD is 20 times more costly than hard disk drives (HDDs) on a cost-per-gigabyte basis.

But, the same story points out, comparing SSD vs. HDD in terms of cost per input/output operations per second (IOPS), the equation looks decidedly different. According to Mark Teter, chief technology officer (CTO) at Advanced Systems Group, "flash is almost 140 times faster than the fastest HDD." For companies whose revenue is tied to a high I/O on important applications, not implementing SSD could actually cost them money in a clearly measurable way. Beyond that, SSD vendors have plenty of examples of how their technologies have helped with customer retention and increased productivity.That said, don't assume that SSD is a bullet-proof answer. When a customer comes to you with a performance concern, resist the urge to sell them a whole new storage system -- and, instead, put on your trusted advisor hat. As we discuss in our Visualizing SSD Readiness guide, there are specific steps you can take to determine whether your customer can benefit from the addition of SSD.The first and probably simplest step, when checking application performance issues, is to test the CPU utilization of the HDD that the application is running on. If the CPU utilization is on average greater than 50%, more than likely the application is CPU-bound rather than storage I/O-bound. But if the CPU utilization rate is below 50%, the CPU is most likely waiting on something. (The lower the rate is, the more likely this is true.) Oftentimes, that's an indication of a storage performance bottleneck.

If your customer's CPU utilization rate is below 50%, the next step is to determine where the performance problems are coming from. In this situation, a utility like PerfMon or third-party tools can help you figure this out.Using one of these tools, the first parameter to look at is something called queue depth. The queue, as it relates to storage, is essentially the number of pending I/O requests to the storage system. The queue depth is affected by the number of drives in a RAID configuration; the more drives there are in the RAID configuration, the more I/O requests can be handled at the same time. If a RAID configuration consistently shows a queue depth, you can reduce that depth by approximately a unit of one with each drive that you add. As long as there is queue depth, adding drives should improve performance.But, adding drives to reduce queue depth can lead to a few problems. The first is that the drive count can become quite high and, of course, quite expensive. If adding a few extra drives to the RAID group can return performance to an acceptable level, then this can be a cost-effective way to solve the performance problem. However, if it takes 50 or 100 additional drives to reduce queue depth to an acceptable level, it could break your customer's budget.Secondly, there is also a concern around capacity waste. In most cases, the application does not need all these drives to store the data. It needs them to generate performance. As a result, terabytes of capacity may go unused, further reducing the ROI of a disk-based solution. (Comparatively, in most cases, one SSD can outperform even a high number of disks, do so less expensively and without wasting terabytes of capacity.)The third problem with adding HDDs to reduce queue depth is that it might not solve the storage bottleneck problem. If queue depth is zero but storage is still the bottleneck, then you have a latency issue. In that case, the only option is a faster drive.

Utilities like PerfMon and others will help you identify problems with disk latency, which refers to the time it takes for a drive to find the requested data and send that data back out the I/O channel. When measuring response time, to identify problems, look for anything that is averaging consistently above 5 to 10 milliseconds per second.On mechanical HDDs with disk latency problems, there are two options. The first is to offer your customers faster drives, but for the last 10-plus years we have been stuck at 15,000-rpm drives, so while your customer may see an improvement with this approach they likely have already tried that as a solution. The alternative to a faster drive is to make the response time of the drive faster by making sure the data is on the outer edge of the disk's platter, a technique called short stroking. This essentially means formatting only the outer part of the drive. While this does increase performance, it also wastes a lot of disk capacity -- as much as two-thirds of the total capacity of the drive.If your customer doesn't yet have 15,000-rpm HDDs, buying them and then short-stroking them is going to be an expensive option. With SSD, on the other hand, response time is often all but eliminated and done so at a significantly lower cost.

The challenge with SSD is to know what to look for. The simple test is to know what processor utilization is on the servers that are hosting the application of file servers that are serving the data. If it is low, it's time to break out utilities to look at the queue depth and response time parameters. If queue depth or response time is high, more than likely SSD will make a dramatic improvement to the customer's environment.

About the author

George Crump is president and founder of Storage Switzerland, an IT analyst firm focused on the storage and virtualization segments. With 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the United States, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland, George was chief technology officer at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection. Find Storage Switzerland's disclosure statement here.

NavigateStorage offers a full line of storage from many vendors. Contact us at 978-318-9000 or write us. You can read the full article here.

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Here is why NavigateStorage is the right choice.
NavigateStorage since 1999 has focused on Data Protection for you our customers.
With our initial beginnings in the Storage Area Network marketplace featuring storage consolidation and heterogeneous front end support we have grown to provide a full range of storage, backup, disaster recovery, archiving and security solutions from our partner vendors. Today our solutions include
Storage - High performance primary and cost effective secondary arrays - iSCSI, SATA, Fibre Channel all vendors
Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs), Tape libraries and best tape media prices in town for new direct from manufacturers
Email, IM, File and SharePoint Archiving and Retrival including Legal/Human Resources Discovery
Security - anti-virus, anti-spam, data leakage solutions
Network products from Qlogic and Brocade
High availability, clustering server solutions
Virtual Machine Solutions - VMware, Virtual Iron, and Vizioncore
By first fully understanding the needs and goals of our customers and then through creative design, our hardware and software solutions deliver high quality, reliable and efficient solutions.